


those two infinities

by scornandivory



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Typical Violence, F/F, M/M, alternating povs: fun for the whole family, author is entirely up their own ass and You Can Tell, content warnings for suicidal ideation and self mutilation, hey nicky what's the most you've ever lost on a coin toss, nicky di genova's no good very bad half century, now featuring even less understanding of historical events and weather patterns than ever before!, unbeta'd unbent unbroken
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:13:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27509641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scornandivory/pseuds/scornandivory
Summary: There are places in this world the sun cannot reach, and there are things buried in the dark of those places. Nicolò di Genova drowns, and drowns, and drowns.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko (background), Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 4
Kudos: 43





	those two infinities

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter needed at least one more editing pass than it got. Mea culpa.

**part one: goussainville, london, and the ocean floor**

In the dream it’s pitch black. That surprises Nile a little bit, under all the panic and fear. In the movies, no matter how far down you go there’s always some light impossibly refracted from the sun on down to the ocean bed because the audience needs to see. In real life, Nile finds out, the sun only reaches so far down and then it’s all darkness and the feeling of your breath being pulled out of you as the weight of the water crushes you from all sides. She struggles, the water flooding into her mouth as she tries to scream. Both actions are equally useless. The ocean swallows her terror as easily as the rest of her and even if her fragile, temporary body could survive long enough to thrash her way to the surface she has no idea which way that would be. 

She’s going to die down here and she knows it. Her every heart beat thrums through her whole body and she feels like it should be sending out a pulse into the waters around her. “Strange,” the meteorologists or oceanologists or whoever studies tidal patterns would say, “there were some unusually high waves for a few minutes there” and nobody would know that it had been fueled by her last frantic moments as her body fought to be alive because no one would ever know what had happened to her, no one would ever find here down here—

She’s at the gate, the last dredges of her panicked consciousness fighting to stay anchored in her body, when the rage hits her. That’s how she realizes she isn’t alone. She’s not capable of anger like that, pure, unadulterated, and _old_. It pings something in her brain as familiar and she realizes that this is the rage that had followed her into death in Afghanistan as she tried to draw breath into her open throat. She is underwater somewhere, so deep down that the light can’t even think of touching her, and _she isn’t alone_. 

There’s an answering pulse to her heartbeat, this one muted and erratic. Sympathetic pain breaks out over her knuckles, her knees, her feet. It’s repetitive and she can feel every strike against… against something, she can’t tell what, but she’s fighting against it with all the strength she can summon and every blow compounds the pain more and more until she wants to beg this companion in the dark to stop, to rest, to let them both stop hurting just for a minute.

 _Get me out of here,_ she thinks. The thought has her voice but someone else’s desperation. _Jesus fucking_ Christ, _won’t someone please get me out of here._ She doesn’t have time to think anything else. She fades, and the rage fades with her. 

The first breath Nile takes upon waking is a long and ragged, rattling down her throat and into her lungs and forcing her back to arch up off the mattress with the intensity of it. The second breath is quieter, but not by much. The noise comforts her almost as much as breathing does; she hadn’t noticed how eerily silent it had been until her rude awakening. 

The others jerk awake around her. Andy spits out a mouthful of Quynh’s hair from where it had fallen into her mouth as they slept. Booker startled in the armchair he’d fallen asleep in. Yusuf blinks blearily at her from where he’d been curled up on a mattress in the corner. 

“All good?” Andy asks as Quynh glares sleepily at her and brushes her long hair over her shoulder. 

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry. Bad dream,” Nile rasps at her. 

It feels like the room itself holds its breath. Joe pushes himself up, bedsprings squealing in protest, as says “tell us.”

Nile looks at the others. Andy and Quynh look like they’re trying to seem encouraging. Booker looks wary. Slowly she nods, sucking in more air just to prove that she can. “I saw flashes of it before, when I died and I saw all of you. It’s… I think it was a little clearer this time. In the dream I’m in the dark, can’t breath, can barely move. And I realize I’m drowning, right? And then I realize I’m not alone. That someone’s—” she swallows hard around the overwhelming desire to beg off having to talk about this ever again and her voice’s threats of breaking “—someone else is down there with me and they’re trapped. I could feel them hammering against whatever had them pinned. I could feel my knuckles and the skin on my knees break open as they just fought and fought to get free, and they felt—” here she does have to stop, take a moment, breathe; she forces herself to calm down and separate herself from the misery of a stranger. “Calling what they felt anger is a pretty fucking big understatement, but God, they felt so angry. I didn’t think people could feel like that.”

The others look at each other like they know what’s happening and Nile remembers what she’s just said. _I saw flashes of it before, when I died and I saw all of you_.

“Who, uh. Who is he?” she asks, massaging her throat in a motion that’s quickly becoming a nervous tic. 

Andy, Quynh, and Booker turn with varying levels of subtlety to look at Joe. Joe sits, staring at the wall. 

“…his name is Nicolò,” Quynh says. “He was… he’s one of us.”

“He and Joe fought each other in the Crusades. Killed each other, then rose together,” Andy continues, voice quiet, eyes trained on the unmoving figure of Joe. “The ended up traveling together. It was funny. Two pairs of immortals circling the world, dreaming about each other. We managed to finally collide with each other in Constantinople a little more than a century after the Crusades.

“He and Joe ended up in Pendle Hill after Jennet Preston’s hanging. We’d been in the area, so we decided someone should go see what was happening.”

“We flipped a coin,” Quynh agrees, reaching over to take Andy’s hand, lacing their fingers together and rubbing her thumb in small circles where it meets the skin on the back of Andy’s hand. “Nicky picked heads. It landed on tails.”

Andy pulls her wife’s hand into her lap so that Quynh ends up leaning on her, head tucked into the juncture where her neck met her shoulder. “We’d been close enough that they got there while things were still going fully to shit. They helped a few so-called heretics escape before they were caught and accused of witchcraft themselves. Of course, they couldn’t be killed, not permanently, so that only confirmed the suspicions about them. And then…”

Almost every conversation Nile has had with her new immortal posse has been pockmarked with quiet moments, pauses where the other four seem to be having conversations based entirely off of eye contact and body language where they gage how much they can tell her before she flips her shit in a big way. This silence is different, so heavy it’s almost physical. Nile sits under the weight of it. She’s not totally sure she has the right to break it, given the conversation, and even if she was… what has she even got to say when the others are looking at Joe like he’s an atom bomb deciding whether or not to blow and Joe’s just looking at the wall like he’d see someone breaking his face on it as a favor right now. 

In the end Booker is the one who breaks the silence. “They thought he and Joe were too powerful together, so they forced him into an iron coffin and dropped it into the sea. Joe’s been searching ever since, but uh. No luck.”

Nile feels something in her stomach bottom out. She’d been aware of the fact that her life was about to get a lot weirder and more difficult if this didn’t turn out to all be a hallucination but she hadn’t thought about the consequences past never seeing her family again. The knowledge that she could have her whole world ripped out from under her, could watch her whole family die, and then could still be hurt like that rattled her. It was insane to think about having to endure that sort of torture without any hope it would ever end. The man’s anger in the dream made a whole hell of a lot more sense now. If she’d been consigned to drown for four hundred years—four _hundred_ —because of, what? The fucked-up social views of a bunch of long-dead bitter old men? Well, shit. She’d be mad too. 

“You would have liked him,” Quynh tells Nile. “He was nice. Gentle.”

“He is the very best of this world,” Joe says. His voice seems shockingly loud, although Nile thought it was about the same level he usually spoke at. “His eyes are like the morning sky. The only thing that could possibly compete in loveliness is his heart.” He looks at Nile, and she immediately wishes he hadn’t. The despair in his eyes had been painful enough to see when he was staring at the wall. With it focused on her, she feels a little like an ant under a magnifying glass. “It was supposed to be me, you know,” he goes on, tone unsettlingly conversational for a many who looked like he was above five seconds away from ripping his own heart out with his bare hands. “They had more disdain for me than they did Nicolò in the beginning, though not by much. After all, I was a sodomite who was of neither their race nor their faith. But Nicolò… he got under their skin. Quoted their own scriptures back at them. Shamed them with their own words. I was a devil there to seduce their women into the service of Satan, but they condemned those frequently and were well respected for it. Nicolò committed a far graver sin: he nearly made them think less of themselves, and they were not the sort of men who endured that with grace.”

Nile couldn’t repress a shudder at the words. _Jesus_.

Joe stands in a single jerking motion that has the others leaning back in their own seats as though they too were about to rise, either to steady him or to cut him off from whatever his next move was. 

“I’m taking a walk,” he says, voice firm. There’s a split second where Nile thinks Quynh might argue, but Andy squeezes her hand and she settles back down without a word. 

Silence falls back over the room, though this time it’s tinged with enough awkwardness and tiredness that it seems less unbreakably sacred. 

“I am so, so sorry,” she says, hoping her voice is a little stronger. “That’s awful.” It’s a small thing to say that completely fails to encompass even a tenth of their continual loss, but if Nile learned one thing when her dad died, it’s that no right words that are gonna lift the pain of the grieving off of their shoulders but the knowledge that someone cared enough to say something to you anyways could mean everything. 

Andy looks down with a little half blink. “Thank you.”

“I’m going to go prep the sink for laundry, just in case,” Quynh says and starts walking decisively out of the room, dragging Andy where their hands are still linked. 

“Booker—” Andy starts, and the man waves her off. 

“I will be the very picture of comfort,” he tells the pair, reaching into a pocket and coming back with a flask. Nile thinks Andy might roll her eyes, but by that point Quynh’s already pulled her through the doorway.

Booker takes a long drink out of the flask and offers it to Nile, who takes it because this just about takes grand prize for _I need a fucking drink_ moments in Nile Freeman’s life. 

“Does it get any better?” she asks after she’s swallowed, voice gritty from the burn in her throat. 

Booker shifts in his chair. “You learn what to expect. That helps. And it’s not always like tonight. Sometimes it’s like he just… stops. You’re still in the dark but nothing’s bleeding through.” He gives her a little half smile. “You caught him on an off day. Sorry about that.”

Nile tosses him his drink back and lays back. “Anything else I should be worried about?”

Booker snorts quietly. “From the dreams? No. But, uh. Joe’s going to ask you about them. It’s stupid, it kills him every time he hears Nicolò’s still in pain, but he can’t help it. Andy and Q’ll chase him off for you if he pisses you off, though.”

“No, no, I get it,” Nile tells him. “I’d want to hear about someone I loved that much too.”

“Oh, we all _get it_. Getting it isn’t the problem, we’ve been doing nothing but getting it for centuries. It’s just a shitty situation to find yourself in where someone’s begging you to hurt them like that. It can cut both ways. So, you know, tell him to fuck off if you need to.” Nile leans up just enough to see what kind of expression Booker’s got on his face to make his voice sound that bitter and they lock eyes. Whatever he sees when he looks at her has him sighing and adding, more quietly, “look, sorry if that sounds harsh, but the only time I ever really see those three actually get knock-down, drag-out angry is when Nicolò comes up at the wrong time, and my understanding is that it was even worse back before I met up with everyone. None of them will talk about it in detail, but there were some fights back in the day, and I think there was one big one that sort of broke them apart for a couple years. I don’t know, every so often there’s this weird tension, like they’re all remembering the same thing and no one wants to be thinking about it. We all love Joe, but the people responsible for this shit have been dead for centuries and since all the right targets for his anger are gone we get to deal with it instead. Just about every conversation to have about Nicolò’s already been had but… I don’t know. He pushes sometimes, even when it’s shitty for the rest of us. He feels guilty for not being able to protect Nicolò, and for not being able to find him, and because neither of them can die they’re just both stuck in this never-ending cycle of pain. It’s… it’s a lot to deal with.”

There’s a flicker of guilt there in Booker’s voice and Nile wonders if it’s for talking about Joe to the new girl behind his back or for not being able to help him. Either way, he there’s a throughline of resigned honesty in what he’s said. 

“It’s a fucked up situation,” she says, because it’s the first true thing that pops into her head to say. 

Booker snorts, raising the flask to his lips. “You said it, sister.”

* * *

_If asked, Nicolò would have been able to tell Nile the story in significantly more detail than Quynh and Andy. He had, of course, been there._

_He would have told her in gentle tones of how they had been captured helping three women flee into the night. How they had been bound and named devils and witches and all sorts of abominations against God. How they had bantered back and forth in between tortures (which he would gloss over so as to not upset Nile, young and fierce), bandying flirtations and century-old jokes across their little stone cell. How they had been stupid, overconfident, and doomed, their egos swelled on immortality and past victories._

_He would not have told her about the sting of rope fibers buried in flesh as his skin healed over them, the white-hot press of the brand, the sounds he made when they cut out his tongue in hateful, ragged strokes for daring to speak to them of their God. And it would have been impossible to describe how it had felt to be dragged out into the light of day, to see first the sun warm his lover’s skin for the first time in days and then the sarcophagus waiting, open and hungry. There are words in no language devised by man or angel that he could have used to tell her how all the mirth had dropped from Yusuf’s perfect eyes as they realized as one what this meant, or the chord of panic and useless, impotent rage in his voice as he screamed_ Nicolò, Nicolò _over and over and over, only to be drowned out by sound of the metal door slamming closed on creaking hinges._

_He would leave out, for his family’s sake, how it had felt to drown the first time, and the second time, and all the times after that, and how he had struggled in vain as he was pulled down, able only to watch the light of the sun grow weaker and weaker until it vanished entirely. He would have softened the edges like a training sword until it could no longer wound, and then he would have given that story to Nile._

_Maybe, if he’d had a drink in his hand and a Yusuf at his side, he would have told Nile in teasing tones of the last conversation they had had, where he’d asked Yusuf if he’d ever been burned alive before and Yusuf had replied “only by love for you, my darling.”_

_“You’re an incurable romantic,” Nicolò had said. Yusuf had given him a slow half-smile and winked in return._

_Of course, Nile could not ask, and Nicolò could not answer. Such is the nature of separation, of lack of a common language, and of drowning. Nile learns Nicolò’s stories from everyone except Nicolò, which is fine. They are, for the most part, correct, and their one true error is innocently made. The four of them had tacitly and independently assumed the worst part of Nicolò’s fate is the relentless, painful process of dying at the bottom of the ocean._

_It is not._

_The worst part, to Nicolò, had been the realization that he was the two things he feared above almost all else: helpless and alone. From the moment he and Yusuf had been captured until the moment the sarcophagus was cast from the boat, he had held onto a sliver of hope. He had been afraid, so incredibly and powerfully afraid, but there had been a degree of certainty in his little family. He could see it in his mind: Yusuf revealing himself as having stowed away on the ship and cutting down their captors before they sailed off, Andromache and Quynh assuming command of a pirate fleet and sailing to his rescue, a screw in his prison coming loose so that he could jump overboard and swim to shore. It would happen now. Or, now. Or,_ now _. But all his nows came and went with Yusuf still in a little stone cell, chained at his waist after he’d bitten through his wrists to escape the cuffs, and Andromache and Quynh considering whether they should leave France to check in with their brothers just yet. The coffin held. But still he believed, almost deliriously, until there was a sudden distinct feeling of weightlessness and his limited view of filthy, satisfied faces was replaced with the blue sky as Nicolò’s hope stayed on the ship without him. There, suspended in the air and staring up at Heaven, the knowledge of what his existence was about to be tore through him like a December storm and he opened his mouth for one final scream. Then the sarcophagus slammed into the surface of the water and he was thrust up into the lid of it with such force it knocked the air out of his lungs as the water began to flood in._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> songs for this chapter: 
> 
> [in all my dreams i drown (the devil's carnival)](https://open.spotify.com/track/6AEmE078InaoGlToKl6qcn?si=9NVHMS9TSaSndlbYiWXQ5w)   
>  [witch hunt (abney park)](https://open.spotify.com/track/3C1ptyHQXs4ZcsYaPDzQF1?si=dfIxj2qnR7y4_3meFkZlIw)   
>  [buried in water (dead man's bones)](https://open.spotify.com/track/55G023KId7BuXQqk0vLsPs?si=Pj0nDJ_IR92eDbfY-kSPEA)

**Author's Note:**

> “He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.” —Victor Hugo


End file.
